


Reaping Honor

by alex_kade



Series: Monstas [6]
Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Vampire, Angst, Gen, History, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Origin Story, Violence, War, just a little bit but it's there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 22:37:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7140452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alex_kade/pseuds/alex_kade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wonho thought he was perfectly happy with his life alone with Shownu, but when he comes across a brave soldier in the chaos of one of Korea's many battlefields, he finds that he just can't stay away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reaping Honor

**Author's Note:**

> Aka, the awaited Hyungwon origin story! Forgive the vague historical references. I didn't want to get too bogged down in the factual details, but I did enough research to form a believable timeline. 
> 
> Also, warning, there's a little bit of slight gore in this. Medical gore. There was a whole other section of more medical gore that I cut out so you won't have to worry about that part. Until later. When I make it its own story. You've been forewarned, lol. 
> 
> Minhyuk got all the angst, Hyungwon got the physical pain. I can't help myself. I love to break my things. THIS IS WHY I CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS.

**Chae Hyung Won, 22 - 1954**

“What are you doing? You can’t bring him in here,” Shownu stated, irritated when Wonho shuffled right in past him. It was a far cry from the days when proteges actually feared and obeyed their sires; or perhaps Shownu had always just been too easy on his.

“He’s just a boy,” Wonho huffed as he carefully laid a bleeding young man out on their dining room table. Considering what they were and what they ate, the morbid absurdity of the situation might have made Wonho laugh if things weren’t so dire. At the moment though, he simply didn’t have anywhere else to put the young soldier where he could properly tend to him, so it was more a matter of making do instead of trying to be ironic. 

“They’re all just children,” Shownu huffed even as he slipped away to retrieve one of the med kits from the nearest bathroom, there and back again in a literal flash. “They’re killing each other by the hundreds every day. Why save this one?”

Wonho hurriedly tore away the soldier’s uniform jacket and shirt, hissing at the bleeding wound down in the young man’s side. The bullet was still in there, but not too deep, and it was far enough to the left where Wonho didn’t think it had caused too much damage internally. If he cleaned it well enough he didn’t think there would be any reason for the boy not to make a full recovery.

“You should’ve seen him. He’s not like the others,” Wonho spoke as he worked, taking what he needed from Shownu’s hands without having to ask his sire for anything. They made a good team, working in sync with a fluid ease that had come not just from the bond that tied sire and protege together, but from having lived comfortably in one other’s presence for nearly thirty years. The two were inseparable at that point, even if they did argue about what was best for them at times. 

Shownu had warned Wonho a full year before that war was just on the horizon; he could feel the electric spark of violence in the air as easily as if a storm was casting a shadow over the countryside. He had wanted them both to stay out of it, to stick close to home and protect it from troops of either side if they happened to stumble across their little castle in the mountain woods. Wonho couldn’t seem to listen though, involving himself in the conflict just as he’d done a decade before in the world’s Second War. He had come from a time when Korea was under rule of an invading nation, after all, and he seemed determined not to let that happen again, even if it meant fighting against the country’s own citizens.

For his part, Shownu only stepped in when it seemed his protege had gotten himself into trouble, and had brought him home on more than one occasion to stitch him up and pull bits of metal out of his flesh. He’d lost track of how many times he’d scolded his only companion, not only for the injuries he seemed to recklessly gather unto himself, but to remind him of how dangerous it would be if anyone caught on to what he was. He had to be very careful not to be seen doing anything vampiric in nature, and he constantly had to hide his eyes from direct view of any human. They were already frightened enough of their own kind; they would literally crucify Wonho if they discovered a demon in their midst.

Yet now here he was, bringing one of them directly into their home. 

“Why?” Shownu pressed. “Why is this one special?”

Wonho’s lip pulled up in a concentrated sneer as he worked the mangled bullet out of the boy’s body and tossed it to the side. “He’s smart, and he shows no fear out there-”

“-Fearlessness can be dangerous,” Shownu quickly reminded him.

“I didn’t say he was fearless,” Wonho corrected. “I said he doesn’t show it. Remember when the invasion started? We could hardly keep our own troops from running off the battlefield. This one caught my eye even back then, when he was just a volunteer recruit. His helmet was too big for his head and kept sliding over his eyes, but he just pushed it back up and kept on marching. He was terrified, but he kept going, trying to set a good example for his little brother.”

Shownu pursed his lips in thought at the mention of the soldier’s brother. “The rest of their family didn’t make it?”

Wonho nodded, showing little emotion over the tragic loss despite his heightened empathy. Civilian casualties were increasing every day to the point where it was just a part of normal life in Korea, most of them to warfare, several others falling to the greed of the older vampire clans who were taking advantage of the unsupervised death toll to do some recruiting of their own. Times of war were practically open buffets and open “enrollment” periods for those of inhuman blood. Wonho was glad every day that Shownu wasn’t like that.

“I pulled him from the northern lines,” he continued, his voice taking on a sympathetic tone. “The Chinese stepped in. His commanding officer fell in the first onslaught, but when the others began to panic, he stood up and started barking orders like an experienced general. I think his father might’ve been military before him; he knew too much about battle mechanics for someone so young, and his brother was keeping up better than some of the troops who were years older.”

Shownu arched an eyebrow at that. “ _Was_ keeping up?” he questioned, but then caught wind of something amiss, distracting him from the conversation. He snatched at Wonho’s wrist, pulling it away just as he was about to put the first stitch in the wound he had just finished cleaning out. “Wait, there’s still something in there. A piece of fabric, I think. He could get sick if you leave that in.”

Nudging his protege aside and forgetting about his displeasure over the boy having been brought into his home, he bent down over the bullet hole and pressed his mouth to it, creating suction with his lips. The taste of warm copper sliding down his throat sparked his animalistic side, but that was not what this was about; he was not intentionally feeding off the young man Wonho had brought in to save. At least that was what he repeated to himself in his mind, but he still had to fight to keep his fangs sheathed up where they would remain harmless as he turned his other senses on, the ones that allowed him to almost “see” inside another living body. He monitored the boy’s vitals carefully as he worked his tongue into the ragged wound, seeking out the tiny particle of debris that didn’t belong; it was nothing more than a few balled up threads of the soldier’s shirt, but Shownu had seen what such a trivial bit of foreign matter could to do a person, and the outcome was never pretty. 

“Shownu, he’s waking,” Wonho warned as the older vamp was forced to adjust the angle of his jaw against the boy’s side in order to scoop up the piece of fabric. The crude doctoring was clearly hurting the young man, but Shownu didn’t stop.

 _‘Settle him,’_ he replied, too close to retrieving the offensive material to pull back now.

Wonho hovered over the soldier, his hand resting on the boy’s forehead as pain-fogged eyes cracked open to peer up at the ceiling in confusion. A small cry tore out of his throat as Shownu shifted again, but he cut it off himself, clenching his jaw tight and balling up his fists against the discomfort. Other than that he didn’t move, just flicked his focus over to Wonho’s concerned visage where his gaze settled on the vampire’s red eyes. _That_ was when he reacted, panicked fear making him jerk away from Wonho so quickly that he might’ve fallen off the table if not Shownu holding him down.

“You’re okay, you’re alright,” Wonho soothed, using his charm against the boy to calm his fears, to make him not see what he was actually seeing, wiping selected visual memories almost as quickly as they came to make him forget the terror of being confronted by a demon even while he was speaking with one. “You were shot. Do you remember? We’re just taking care of you, then we’ll let you go.”

The soldier sucked in a sharp breath and held it, swallowing hard against the tremble that had begun working its way through his body. “My brother,” he puffed out on a strained whisper.

Wonho shook his head. “They took him. I’m sorry. They took everyone who was left.”

The boy’s face screwed up in a reflection of anguish in its purest form, an expression that stretched far beyond a show of his physical pain. Wonho felt it both inside of his mind and out, filling up the air in the room around them, threatening to consume them all with its intensity before it was suddenly torn away as the soldier abruptly returned to unconsciousness. His body went limp as Shownu jerked away and spat a mouthful of blood to the floor.

“It’s done. Patch him up before he bleeds to death,” he said, his tone taking a dark turn that Wonho wasn’t entirely comfortable with.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, quickly taking his sire’s place down by the boy’s side again where he could start in on the stitchwork. Shownu’s saliva was already working at slowing the stream of blood that was pouring down onto the floor, but this wasn’t a pinprick hole caused by a sharp tooth they were dealing with; it would not close up on its own without some outside help, not in time to keep the boy’s health from deteriorating to dangerous levels.

“Don’t tell me you didn’t feel that,” Shownu said angrily, and waved his hand at Wonho’s ministrations. “This is pointless. He won’t stop. You’re fixing him up so he can go out there and get himself hurt again, or probably killed. He’s angry now. He’s not going to stop until he gets his brother back.”

Wonho shrugged his shoulders, his minute anxiety over his sire’s random outburst draining out of him. _This_ was something he could deal with easily. “We would do the same for each other,” he stated, making his point in the quickest, simplest manner possible. “He’s one of the good ones, Shownu, I can feel it. I’ll take care of him.”

“And I need to take care of _you,”_ Shownu stressed. “Do you understand that? He’s not my priority. You are.”

“I know.” 

It was an appeasing statement, but a truthful one. Wonho held no illusions as to what would happen to the boy if his survival were to directly lead to any suffering on Wonho’s part. Shownu was never one to dive into conflict, not unless there was good reason, and that “good reason” only seemed to come about whenever Wonho was in peril. Shownu only got angry, got violent for _him._

Thinking on that, he quietly finished up the needlework and carefully wrapped up the boy’s side, running out quickly to fetch a warm blanket to drape over him. He would keep the boy comfortable until it was safe to bring him back to his own, then it would be up to his human companions to finish tending to his recovery. It would be safer for him that way.

Beyond that, they would just have to wait and see what happened to their soldier; but Wonho already knew that Shownu would be right. That brother was the only person the boy had left in the world; he was going to stop at nothing to get him back.

“Hey, Shownu?” Wonho asked as he stroked a hand soothingly through the young man’s hair, pondering on the boy’s personality traits, his strengths and weaknesses as a brother and as a fighter. His curiosity got the best of him. “What did he taste like?”

Shownu sighed from where he was leaning back in the corner of the room, putting distance between himself and the human that he was certain would be dead within the year.

“Like fire,” he replied, “and rain.”

Wonho nodded, not entirely surprised. It sounded like the perfect combination. He almost felt bad for those who had just made mortal enemies of this soldier; he was going to burn a path of destruction through them when he was set back loose into the world. When it was over, he would wash it all away, water sweeping clear the ashes as if they’d never existed in the first place, just remnants of so much dead underbrush burned down into crumbling dust. It wasn’t revenge he was after; he was just seeking a path to get back to his brother, and anyone who got in his way would be damned.

~~~~~~~

The war lasted over two more bloody, murderous years before it finally ended, not with a victory but with a pointless stalemate. With the aid of the Chinese government, the South Koreans were pushed back down below the 38th Parallel, both sides continually fighting to gain control until finally the call for a tentative peace was answered. The death toll by that time had reached nearly three million, only a third of which were military personnel. The civilian casualty count was so high that even the worst of the vampire lineage had ceased their pilfering of human lives, the impossible tragedy of it all touching even their frozen hearts.

Wonho tried his best to keep tabs on the young soldier over that time, but he had reacted exactly as they had predicted; the moment he was able to get back on his feet, he was back out on the front lines with a new rage fueling his thirst for battle. It didn’t mean he had gotten careless in his urgency to win his brother back, however; in fact, he had gotten even more intelligent in the way he engaged the enemy, paying more attention to their tactics and honing in on their weaknesses with frightening accuracy. The way he fought and dispatched his opponents became swifter, smoother, and without any hint of emotion that would cause others to hesitate in taking the kill. He was ruthless, but it kept him alive, kept his comrades alive, and boosted him up the ranks in quick order despite his youth.

That was what Wonho had observed in the few times when he could track him down, at least. It was difficult to keep tabs on him without being able to follow his activity during the day. Wonho couldn’t always return home by sunrise depending on where he had situated himself during the night battles, but even if he managed to hole himself up in a location not too far from where he’d last seen the boy, he would often wake in the evenings to discover the soldier’s unit had long since moved on to areas that wouldn’t be safe for Wonho to access. Open areas were never good for a vampire, not with so many paranoid people walking around waving heavy artillery, so there would often be weeks on end when he would be unable to monitor the boy’s activity.

Those weeks drove him insane, but it drove him _more_ insane when he was in the same vicinity as the boy and could do very little to actually help him.

“You want him, don’t you?” Shownu asked quietly one evening as they were just settling down in preparation for the morning light. 

Wonho had been stuck home for nearly a week by that point, having been caught out in a tank battle where there were too many eyes on him to safely attempt any of his vampiric tricks. He couldn’t wipe the minds of all of them, so the best he was able to do was keep his head ducked where they couldn’t see his demon’s eyes and fight as if he were just another soldier stuck in the fray. He didn’t even remember the blast that took him out of the picture. All he knew was that one minute he was running, the next he was in Shownu’s bed, his body practically immobile. 

“Hyungwon?” he had croaked out, his first word since returning to the land of the conscious, just the act of voicing that one simple name enough to light a fire in his already smoke-damaged throat.

“Your soldier?” Shownu had asked from where he was laying down beside his protege, as close as he could get without touching him, without hurting him, but not nearly close enough to be satisfying to either of them. “I don’t know. I’m sorry, Wonho. I told you, he’s not my priority.”

It was days later when Wonho was eventually able to convince Shownu to go out and look for him, to at least let him know if the boy was still alive. There were few times over the course of their vampiric lives in which Shownu had been able to deny his protege any direct request; with Wonho begging from a bed, weak and mangled, he was helpless to do anything but comply. He only wished he could bring home better news when he finally did track down the brave young man that Wonho had become so infatuated with.

According to medical records, Hyungwon had somehow managed to survive the same attack Wonho had been caught up in, but he hadn’t fared well. He was teetering back and forth on the edge of death, his body recovering from a long surgery in which several pieces of shrapnel had to be removed, and several others had to be left in. If he survived, his recovery would be long and nowhere close to painless, one of his legs so badly damaged they weren’t sure if he would walk again. He was lucky they had even managed to save it in the first place.

Wonho hadn’t taken the news well and blamed himself for not doing what he’d set out to do. It was a silly mission really, and Shownu told him as much in as kind of words as he could manage; it was war, and Wonho could not be at the boy’s side at all times. With as determined as Hyungwon had been to tear through as many enemy ranks as it took to get to his brother, it was only a matter of time before he fell to his own obsessive drive.

“I _don’t_ want him,” Wonho replied to Shownu’s question. “I _need_ him. Why is that? Why do I feel like I need him so badly?”

“Because,” Shownu breathed, and hesitated in how to explain the feeling as he hugged his protege in tighter against him, “he spoke to your soul just like you did with mine. It means there’s a piece inside of him that fits in a hole you didn’t know was inside of you. It’s not something I can fill.”

Wonho tilted his head up at his sire. “Why not? You’ve always been the only person I needed until now.”

With another heavy sigh, Shownu shook his head at the question. “It’s just part of who we are. It’s actually very...human. One person can’t be solely responsible for all the needs of another. It’s why there are friends and there are lovers, different people to balance out different aspects of a personality. The two of us? We come from different times, different worlds. I knew eventually you would turn to somebody else who could balance you out better than I can.”

“But I don’t want to,” Wonho protested. “I didn’t ask to feel this way.”

“Nobody asks to fall in love,” Shownu reminded him. “That’s all this is, a different sort of love, and it’s good to feel it. Most of our kind don’t pay attention to it anymore. They take whoever’s convenient, whoever’s strong physically, but they don’t realize it only creates a weaker bond. If you wait, if you take only the ones who speak to your soul like Hyungwon spoke to yours, it’ll make you both stronger in the end. It’ll make _me_ stronger. That’s how you build a powerful family.”

Wonho tucked his head against his sire’s chest and mulled over the words. He had Shownu’s approval, his blessing, but could he really do it? Could he take a human soul, one who was already so deadly fierce and dangerously passionate, and infect it with demon’s blood? What would happen to Hyungwon then? Would the distant, violent side of him take him over completely, or would the caring side, the side that fought desperately only for the love of his brother win out? Would it be a monster Wonho created, or would it be a shield against future injustices?

“Both,” Shownu replied easily. “Fire and rain. He’ll be both.”

It was all too tempting an offer to pass up, but Wonho knew that his duty to patience had to come before all else. With his injuries, he wasn’t yet healthy enough for the physical drain that siring a protege required, and besides that, Hyungwon was a fighter both on and off the field. He wasn’t dying just yet, and Shownu had a rule against siring anybody who wasn’t already in the clutches of Death’s hand. Then there was the added dilemma that Wonho didn’t exactly know _how_ to sire somebody. It wasn’t like he remembered much from his own vampiric birth.

“Can you teach me?” he asked. “I want to do it right. When it’s time, I want to make sure it’s right.”

“You’ll know how to do it,” Shownu smiled. “It’s instinct, but I’ll talk you through it anyway, if it’ll make you feel better.”

“Please.”

Shownu complied, spending the rest of the remaining evening telling Wonho about his birth into the vampiric underworld, filling in every last detail that he couldn’t remember for himself. He could only hope that the experience would be as rewarding for him as it was for Shownu, and hoped even more that Hyungwon wouldn’t hate him for it in the end.

~~~~~~~

Hyungwon stood at the border of the 38th parallel, the December cold biting into every single one of the scars he’d earned over the course of the war. His injuries had brutally forced him out of it earlier that year, but it felt like more time had passed than that, that he’d been struggling to regain his feet over _several_ years instead of only months. It felt even longer, more like decades, since he had last seen his baby brother. The more time he’d wasted in the hospital, the less time he had dedicated to pulling him out of whatever POW camp he’d been stuck in for the past two and half years, ever since they had been overcome trying to assist in the Battle of Chosin Reservoir. He still had few memories of what had happened after he’d been gunned down. All he knew was that somebody had carted him off the field and managed not only to treat him, but to return him all the way back behind the safety of the South Korean border. 

He also remembered a sorrowful voice telling him that his brother had been taken, a voice that would forever be playing on repeat inside his mind. It was the one thing that had been driving him forward in the years since, allowing him to plow through his enemies with the cold detachment of a tiger consuming its prey, the one thing that had kept him from giving in to death’s call on that hospital gurney and pushing him to get back up after he’d officially told Death to fuck off, the one thing that inspired him to stand on his own two feet so he could meet his brother at the border upon receiving the news that the war was over and there would be a prisoner exchange.

That had begun back in August, yet here it was in the December winter and Hyungwon’s brother still had yet to cross over the lines. Today was to be the last day for the voluntary open exchange, then beyond that anybody who was left would be given a final ninety days to change their minds. Kyungwon wouldn’t need it though; he hated the Communist North even more than Hyungwon did. It was what had prompted him to follow his older brother into battle following the merciless slaughter of their family, an utterly unnecessary act of violence. Their father was an honored soldier from the Second World War, yes, but his fighting days were long over. He had been grievously wounded, just like Hyungwon was now, posing no further threat to the Northern invaders. That hadn’t seemed to matter though. While Hyungwon and Kyungwon had been out working, filling in for their father’s inability to provide for his family, the Northern troops had broken into their home and gunned down their father, mother, and older sister in cold blood. Their family died all due to a piece of intelligence that was no longer accurate - their father, the proclaimed “Golden Lion” of the Second World War, no longer had any teeth to bare. 

Hyungwon remembered afterwards how the whole incident had left him with a cold detachment towards mankind in general, an easy step for him to take considering he was never exactly a social butterfly to begin with. That role fell easily to his sister who could light up a room with only her smile, a smile that would never see the light of day again. Kyungwon, though, he’d always had a bit of a temper on him; it wouldn’t take much to set him ablaze against even the slightest wrongdoing. It has always been Hyungwon’s calm nature that would rein him in, but back then, back when they’d been standing in the doorway of their home staring at the bodies of their parents and their sister, Hyungwon had decided it was time to let the reins slip free.

With the two of them working together, Kyungwon taking direction from Hyungwon’s keen grasp on battle tactics, they had been virtually unstoppable. The UN soldiers had seen their potential early on and scooped them up into their ranks, putting them exactly where they wanted to be - gunning down Northern troops at the head of the push to overtake the border. It had been brilliant right up until the day when Kyungwon had cornered an old man at the edge of a battlefield.

“Kyungwon,” Hyungwon had called out. “Leave him. He’s harmless.”

Kyungwon had shaken his head. “Do you know who this is?” he’d asked. “Weren’t you listening to those guys back there before the ambush? They were practically shitting themselves over how they had just met the ‘Spear of Victory.’ This is him, Hyungwon. This is the guy.”

The old man looked between the two brothers, eyes wide and frightened, a discarded cane nestled in the grass by his side. Hyungwon immediately thought back to his father and wondered if this was how he had looked in his moments when the Northern soldiers had shown him no mercy.

“Leave him,” he said quietly, and reached out to grasp at his brother’s wrist in attempt to tug him away.

“But-”

“-Kyungwon! I said leave him. He’s no threat to us.”

His brother had huffed in irritation, but followed along just the same right up until they heard the man start to scramble to his feet behind them. Then, without warning, he turned around and fired his gun, dropping the old man dead right there in the field. 

It was the first and only time Hyungwon could remember being genuinely irate with his brother. It was the first and only time he had laid a hand on his brother in anything other than familial affection, striking him hard with an open palm across the face. Kyungwon had looked at him, his eyes stinging with a hurt that reached beyond the physical pain.

“Congratulations,” Hyungwon spat at him in a voice that was cold and unforgiving. “Now you’re no better than them.”

He had turned and walked away from his baby brother then, and it was only a few days later, a few days in which the two had avoided each other, that he was being gunned down outside of Chosin. That strike of his hand and those hateful words had been the last interaction he’d had with Kyungwon, which was why he was so very desperate to see his brother again. He _had_ to make it right. He _needed_ Kyungwon to know that he hadn’t meant his angrily spoken words.

But he didn’t come. Hyungwon waited at the border all day, his body eventually giving out on him so that he was forced to sit on the cold ground, and still Kyungwon didn’t come. He didn’t cross over the border, which could only mean one possible thing.

Hyungwon’s baby brother was dead. He was dead, and had probably died thinking his beloved hyung hated him.

Feeling older and more tired than what constituted his twenty-one years of life, Hyungwon pushed himself up on his crutches and ambled back towards the hospital that still served as his home, not entirely certain why he was bothering anymore. Once he was fully healed he would be sent back out to do...what? There was nothing left for him. There was no one to fight - not that he ever _could_ fight again - and there was no one to take care of. He wasn’t even sure if his old home was still standing, it had been that long since he had set foot on his old property. Really, without his brother, what was left for him to do? What was left for him to fight for?

 _Nothing_ , he concluded as he collapsed heavily onto his bed. _Nothing at all._

~~~~~~~

“Shownu, it’s time!” Wonho hollered as he practically flung himself through the door to the den, interrupting his sire’s reading time. Except he wasn’t reading anymore. He was standing there already prepared to move.

Shownu arched a brow at him. “You came running up here just to tell me that?” he asked. “You should’ve stayed downstairs with him. It’s not like I didn’t hear you carting him in.”

“I…” Wonho clamped his eyes shut. “I’m stupid. I’m panicking. I don’t know if I can do this. You do it.”

A lofty chuckle bubbled up from Shownu’s chest. “I can’t do it for you. Then he won’t be yours, he’ll be mine. You two chose each other. It has to be you.”

“What if it doesn’t work?”

“It can’t not work, Wonho, not unless you lose control - which you _won’t,”_ Shownu was quick to point out before his protege could start hyperventilating about it. He turned around and casually placed his book back on the shelf before making his way over to Wonho. “Calm down. You’re acting like you’re about to actually give birth.”

“Aren’t I?” Wonho practically squeaked. 

A fond, sympathetic grin appeared on Shownu’s face. “This will be much more pleasant for you than real childbirth, I promise, and I’ll be right there. Just remember that I won’t be doing anything but watching and helping you control him when this is over. It shouldn’t be too hard since you already kidnapped him from his hospital bed to bring him here.”

“I-”

“-panicked, I know. It’ll be alright. You’ll see.”

Shownu herded him back downstairs and nearly laughed as he caught sight of Hyungwon laid out once again on the dining room table. They really needed to find a better place to administer medical care; he made a mental note to clean out and restore the downstairs guestroom, one that had long since been turned into storage for aging antiques that were no longer of any use. Having a first floor nursing room would be far better than having to tote anyone up the stairs, and he had the feeling that Hyungwon might be as much of a handful in that regard as Wonho was. 

“Alright. What do I do?” Wonho asked as he approached the dying boy and Shownu pulled out one of the ornate dining room chairs to sit in, scooting it far enough away from the table where he wouldn’t feel like he was sitting down for a feast.

“You tell me,” he instructed calmly.

Wonho furled his brow and took a deep breath, clearly doing his best to center himself so he could think. How, exactly, such an emotionally sensitive sweetheart had been a product of Shownu’s making, he would never know. He was just incredibly happy for the blessing that Wonho was in his life.

“Oh, I didn’t ask!” Wonho blurted out, and dropped a hand over his eyes, frustrated with himself. “What if he doesn’t wake up and I can’t ask?”

“Then you have to let him go,” Shownu reminded him gently. “A vampire who doesn’t _want_ to live only winds up bitter and cold in the end. He’ll leave you. If you can’t get his blessing, you have to let him go.”

Wonho’s face crumpled at the concept, and he turned back towards Hyungwon to whisper encouraging words into his ear. Shownu refrained from listening in on the private, one-sided conversation, but he could hear Wonho’s silent plea echoing loud and clear into the room.

_Please wake up. Please want this. I need you._

~~~~~~~

_That voice._

Hyungwon knew it the moment it filtered into his consciousness. He thought he was done, that he could finally go, but no; the voice was bringing him back into the world once again. 

He decided he hated that voice. It would’ve been better if it had just let him die in the first place instead of driving him towards a goal that could never have been achieved. His brother was dead. Those years he’d spent fighting, killing, struggling through his pain, they had all been for nothing.

“No, not nothing,” the voice corrected him softly. “I know what it’s like to live under a nation where you have few freedoms. We still have a long way to go before I’ll be satisfied, but we’re still better off than if we’d fallen to Northern rule. You helped to prevent that from happening. You helped save your entire country.”

Like his country had done so much for him. They should’ve provided for his family after his father had come back injured from the war. They should’ve done something to usher them to safety once the North had begun its invasion. They should’ve stopped whatever intel leak there was that had painted their home as a target in the first place. They should’ve done something sooner to get his brother out of whatever POW camp he’d been in before he could fall at the hands of the enemy. As far as Hyungwon was concerned, his country could go fuck itself.

“And the people in it?” the voice pressed. “The innocents? What about them? The sons and brothers and daughters and mothers? What about the fathers, the sisters, all the grandchildren who deserve to grow up without the fear of violence that you had to face? Are you going to abandon all of them too?”

Hyungwon would’ve shrugged if he could have, but even the thought of moving made him feel hot and sore and exhausted. Even if he wanted that, wanted to continue to ensure that no one else would have to go through what he went through ever again, he couldn’t. He was done. His leg was a mess, just so much scar tissue over bone that he would never be able to fully walk on again. The shrapnel caught close to his spine made it too dangerous for him to be engaging in any strenuous activity, and there was a piece lodged in his lung that constantly made it hurt to draw in a full breath of air. He’d been living with all that for over a year now; or, more like _not_ living with it. He’d given up after that cold day six months ago when it had dawned on him that his brother was dead. It was time to stop, to let the damage done to his body drag him down towards Hell where he belonged.

“It doesn’t have to,” that damned voice informed him. “I can stop it. I can heal you, make you strong again. You’ll be better than you were before, stronger and faster and so much harder to kill. You can make a difference if you want to.”

Well that was just dumb. The voice was speaking to him like he had some sort of noble drive to set things right. He didn’t. He didn’t care anymore. He wasn’t that righteous, and now he was just annoyed. He didn’t know how, but the irritation allowed him to muster up the strength to force his eyes open and gasp out in frustration, “I don’t want to be some stupid comic book hero.”

The young man who owned the voice smiled, ruby-red eyes leering down at him with a wicked sort of grin. “That’s good, because what I’m offering you the opposite of that. I’m asking to turn you into a demon.”

Hyungwon blinked in confusion, wondering if he wasn’t dreaming. He felt like he should’ve been afraid, but fear took energy and he just didn’t have any left to give. Instead he just watched the demon, curious, wondering what it might do or say next.

 _‘We’re better than comic book heroes,’_ it kissed into Hyungwon’s brain, letting him drink in the power behind the words. _‘You can live nearly forever if you want to.’_

Forever. Forever was a long time, especially when he hadn’t even been prepared to live for another single year. What would he do with a forever life? Where would he go? What would be the point if he had no one to share it with?

The face above him tempered itself into a gentle, loving expression. “With me,” the demon said. “You can share it with me until we _both_ go to Hell.”

Suddenly Hyungwon’s mind was flooded with images that seemed new, yet were also familiar to him, like reading a book that he’d forgotten he had read before. He saw this man, this demon, fighting with him on the battlefield, always watching him, assisting him from afar, even taking a bullet for him on one occasion that he’d never even been aware of. He saw how torn he was as he’d watched Hyungwon get gunned down at nearly the same moment when Kyungwon and some of the others were being beaten down by the enemy, and how helpless anyone would’ve been to stop it. He saw the concern on the demon’s face when Hyungwon had woken up on the table - _this table_ \- to what had felt like a vice clamping onto his side and a worm burrowing its way into his wound, and caught those red eyes watching him from the shadows as he’d woken up back in the city not far from the clinic he had stumbled his way into. He was _there_ , had been there for all three years of the war, watching over him like some sort of guardian angel whenever it was in his power to do so; yet here he was, telling Hyungwon that he was not an angel, not a hero, but some sort of demon who was eventually destined to burn in Hell.

It should’ve frightened Hyungwon knowing that he’d been stalked and saved by a creature of evil for so many years. He found that it didn’t though, not now, and not just because of his exhaustion; he was just accepting it as if this had been written into his fate all along. What did that say about him? That he’d been rejected from Heaven from the very start? Was that why he’d been able to kill with such ease and such coldness without even a second thought?

“Never an innocent,” the demon whispered fondly, correcting Hyungwon’s thoughts. “You never killed an innocent. You killed _for_ them, and that’s why I chose you. You are always both death and life, cruelty and kindness, aggression and compassion, action and perception. You are a creation of opposing forces, a perfect balance, and I need that. We need that. The world needs that. Stay with me. We can make a difference to _someone_ , as brothers, forever.”

Hyungwon was silent for a moment before he replied. “Did you practice that speech?” he coughed, a slight smile tilting up one corner of his mouth. 

The demon’s eyes widened in surprise for a moment before he grinned in return. “Some of it, yeah. Did it work?”

Hyungwon thought it over, wondering if the fever from infection was clouding his mind. If he had learned anything from his mother’s teachings it was that demons were smooth, convincing creatures that could talk a cat into eating dead leaves while setting the mouse free. Something inside of him was telling him that this wasn’t quite the case here, though, that this demon actually did care about him and wanted to do some real good in the world. Not that Hyungwon really cared about the world; he was still in the mindset that it had fucked him over and could damn itself. It was the sheer affection he was feeling coursing through him in waves that was making him hesitate to turn down the offer, the same kind of affection he had felt with his brother, his sister, his mother and father; he _missed_ it, and knowing he could potentially have that again, that’s what won him over in the end. Nothing else mattered to him at all, not even a little bit.

“I can accept that,” the demon continued to smile. “Is that an official yes?”

Hyungwon felt like he was signing his soul away, a devil holding a quill out to him dipped in blood, waiting for him to place his mark on a contract for the damned. Well, he was already destined to Hell; might as well enjoy a few extra, healthy years in the world before he had to leave it. At least he wouldn’t be alone.

“Yeah,” he grunted, wanting to say more, but his breath caught on a cough that turned searingly painful as it shifted the piece of shrapnel inside his infected lung. It tore at something in there, he could feel the burn of it, and he knew it would only be a matter of time before he was spitting up blood.

“I’ll fix it, I’ll fix it,” the demon assured him, and opened his mouth to reveal twin pointed fangs.

 _Oh_ , Hyungwon thought, _you’re_ that _sort of demon._

He remembered nothing else as the vampire dipped down and sunk his fangs deeply into his neck; whatever was going to happen was going to happen, so he relaxed into it and let his mind slip away. He would wake or he wouldn’t. There was nothing more to it than that.

~~~~~~~

Hyungwon’s birthing had not gone as smoothly as Wonho or Shownu had hoped. There had been some initial issues with the shrapnel that had been caught inside his body that had caused a bit of a panic, but thanks to Shownu’s swift doctoring, the problem had been dealt with early enough to prevent further complications. He had spent his month in quarantine allowing his body and mind to fully adapt to his new form, Wonho sticking by his side through the majority of it. Shownu had been right in that, too; Wonho _did_ know what to do when the time was right, just as a mother would instinctively know how to take care of her young. He also felt that siring a protege was maturing him to an entirely different level, forcing him to become the caretaker and the mentor in a way that was different than how he had dealt with Shownu. Hyungwon, as a fledgling, needed him, depended on him to survive and to grow, and something about that made Wonho feel like he needed to become a little less reckless in how he treated himself.

Part of him felt a little guilty about the way he’d behaved sometimes in Shownu’s care. No wonder his sire was always out of sorts when Wonho was showing his obstinate side; just _thinking_ about Hyungwon going out on his own and potentially getting hurt was painful. If Wonho could have his say in the matter, he would _never_ let his protege leave the estate.

That, of course, couldn’t happen. Eventually they had to go out so they could teach Hyungwon how to properly feed, and much to Wonho’s relief, he was turning into the mellow, intelligent vampire that Wonho had hoped he would become. It was also clear that he could be just as dangerous as he’d been on the battlefield if he wanted to be, which was something Wonho felt like he needed to keep a firmly watchful eye on given the soldier’s new vampiric nature. He could kill in an instant if he wanted to.

It was several months after his birth when they were attacked by their first enemy clan trying to poach him from them. It was then that Shownu and Wonho found out that, yes, Hyungwon _was_ as deadly as they feared he would be, but only for the same reasons that he’d been deadly in the war. Then he had fought for the love of his brother, now he was fighting for his love for _them_ with an intensity that burned so hot it scalded whoever tried to get in his way. Afterwards, when it was all over and nothing was left but the dead remains of the enemy clan, he turned to Wonho and Shownu and smiled at them, an expression that was as soothing as a summer storm on a sweltering day. Fire and rain, red and grey, balanced and beautiful just like the colors of his eyes.

He was, in Shownu and Wonho’s eyes, nothing short of perfect. He had transformed their partnership into a family, and for that they could not have been more grateful. 

If anybody were to peek into the words scrawled on the pages of the secret journal Hyungwon had started for himself, they would’ve seen that he was grateful for them, too. His mother, god rest her soul, had been wrong; demons didn’t _have_ to be evil, and he was glad he had signed his soul away on that proverbial line to join them. He was _not_ a comic book hero, not even remotely, but he was good, he could _do_ good, and with his new family by his side, he thought that maybe the world didn’t have to go fuck itself after all. 

_~Kkeut~_


End file.
